President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew largely positive marks from a heavily Republican audience, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
Nearly two-thirds of speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech, with a smaller 38% offering a very positive response. That’s a few points cooler than the reception to his address to Congress last year and falls below the ratings for his first-term speeches in CNN polling. It’s similar to the ratings that former President Joe Biden saw during his last year in office.
The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 482 US adults who said they watched the presidential address on Tuesday and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.